In present day sawmills, raw lumber usually in the form of delimbed tree trunks are delivered to a section of a sawmill for cutting the trunks into boards having flat opposite faces and usually rough edges which must be removed by edging before the boards are finished. Presently, the boards are fed to an edging station where any roughened edges of a board are to be trimmed. However, for the sake of efficiency and speed, it is necessary that the operator inspect each board to determine which side of the board should be facing upwardly before feeding the board to the edging station. Clearly, in modern sawmills and lumber handling operations, physical inspection by a worker of each board will not only slow down the production throughput of the line but can also lead to a number of quality control errors due to the pressure resulting from the speed of the operation and the tedium of the inspection function. Accordingly, in order to increase quality control, operators have been required to slow down the throughput speed of the board conveyors to allow adequate inspection as well as turning of a selected board over so that the appropriate face, such as the wane face, is directed upwardly to allow the appropriate sections to be trimmed, chipped or sawn off as it is edged.
One system for dealing with this difficulty is to use video equipment to allow an operator to manually detect the orientation and quality of each board and to manually reorient it by mechanical devices for turning the board. The problem with this solution is that every board must still be inspected by the operator so that the throughput speed is still unacceptably compromised.